Where Does Your Wood Come From? (or Why Should I Care?)

Yesterday I walked along several miles of our local (Tuolumne County) abandoned narrow gauge rail line built by a local lumber company. We were hundreds of feet up the side of the mountain, and all you could see for miles around were relatively young trees. Why? From its completion in 1898 until they stopped clear-cutting in 1960, loggers took 3 billion board feet of lumber from just this 70 mile stretch of forest alone! This got me thinking again (don't you hate it when I do that?) So I watched Logging Tech on the History channel and took notes to help me understand what happened. For example the oldest known logging expedition occurred in 2700 BC when the Egyptians eliminated the Cedar forest across all of Lebanon. But lumber was harvested and processed simply, by hand, until the 14th Century, when water wheels were first used to power the saw mills. As the population grew, so did the need for lumber, such that today only 3% of Europe's ancient woodlands remain! Meanwhile in America, after logging-out New England and the Great Lakes we headed west. Suddenly in the 1850s, loggers were confronted with "the largest trees on the planet"; giant Douglas Fir, Sitka Spruce, Coast Redwoods and the Giant Sequoias dwarfed the 100ft high, 2-3ft diameter Eastern White Pines they'd been cutting. Imagine cutting by hand a 230ft tall Giant Sequoia that might be 30ft thick! New tools and techniques were called for! First came a 22ft long hand saw. And since much of the resins collected in the bottom 6-8 feet of the trunk, it was difficult to cut. So loggers would cut a small notch, insert a "springboard", hop up on it, and then "chop the durn thing down!" Then "Bullwhackers" drove oxen that dragged the logs out of the woods over a log road bed called a "skid road." (The term "skid row" referred to the run down saloons and shanty towns at the end of the skid road.) And for the next 100 years, the "River Pigs" using only spiked boots and a hooked pole drove the logs downstream to the mill like cattle. Some times as far as 70 miles -- whew, don't fall!

With the advent of the transcontinental rail line, western forests were linked with eastern markets. And with the industrial revolution starting in the 1870s production took off. A steam driven "Donkey engine" using a "high lead skidding technique" replaced the oxen. One end of the log was attached to a line that ran through a pulley atop a "spar tree", the engine then pulled the line, lifting the logs by one end to skid them as much as 2000 feet across the forest floor. Of course this worked best if you were clear-cutting, but productivity soared! (Here in our town in the Gold Country, we've got one of these engines memorialized outside our County library.) Next giant water flumes were built to float the logs at speeds up to 50 mph down the steep mountains. 16ft long "boxes" were hoisted atop trestles, some 60ft or more in the air. California's Sanger Flume was the largest, costing $300,000 to build in 1890 (that's $6 million today). "Flumeherders" had to clamber out on a narrow catwalk to break up any log jams, and many fell to their deaths. But, you guessed it, lumber production increased again! Locomotives tried to pull cars filled with logs to the mill, but because our Western mountains are so steep they simply slipped. Then in 1880, the Shay Locomotive was invented -- a radical new engine with a toothed gear driving each wheel instead of a piston. It couldn't slip, so these small trains could go up grades as steep as 14%. Some of these engines are still in operation locally. We clear cut untold thousands more acres, including most all of the trees in the Sierra Nevada Mountains! Circular saws (invented in 1777) couldn't handle these large logs. Invented in 1808, the bandsaw had to wait until welding techniques advanced enough in the 1880s so that huge blades could be welded together. These replaced the ganged circular saws. In 1900, German immigrant, Weyerhauser, (of Weyerhauser Plywood) bought 900,000 acres to clear-cut, in the largest private land deal to that date ($5.4 million). So lumber production increased again! But the same year, naturalist John Muir, President Teddy Roosevelt and others created the U.S. Forest Service which has always advocated a more balanced approach to lumber production. Then in 1926, when Stihl invented the chainsaw, and again in 1946 with a new chainsaw tooth that was curled so to extract the wood from the cut more efficiently, loggers really began to cut up! And despite the Forest Service's efforts, clear-cutting was the name of the game until the 1990s! In the U.S., loggers have destroyed more than 96% of our old growth timber! Sanger Lumber Company alone cut 8,000 G. Sequoias (2-4,000 years old each), and I know you've all heard about the 200,000 sq mi. of S. American rainforests that have been stripped! Nothing can live in these clear-cut areas. It's the equivalent of a forest fire, with erosion etc.

Now after much arguing between environmentalists and lumber producers, "responsible forest management" is the new catchphrase. Today 37,000 "tree farms" supply 1/3 of the world's timber. So far these farms don't have any bio-diversity either. Lumber is harvested with machines just like corn. But our 13 Southern states now produce 60% of America's lumber, mostly from these farms. (While in Virginia last month, I checked out the local hardwood production. It's mostly Maple, Walnut, Beech, Oak, and many kinds of softwoods.) And new processing machines are being developed to tread more lightly on the forest floor. The Scandinavians have a new 6-legged walking machine (looks like something out of Star Wars), and our own "cut-to-length" processing machine strips the limbs off and cuts the log to size, right in the forest while riding on huge tires that are like balloons. With selective, responsible logging quickly replacing clear-cutting, the loggers are moving closer to the environmentalists. Lastly they are developing new woods and hybrid wood products for our use. The show was mostly about softwood production, but the same techniques are applied to hardwoods. So when you buy lumber, you now need to find out where it came from: Was it a responsibly managed "farm", or from a certified forest that uses environmentally friendly, sustainable growth techniques? If we don't start demanding these things, the lumber industry won't really change and our grandchildren won't have wood to build with -- it will become extinct! Think about this the next time you go buy a piece of wood!